Radical Mass Media Criticism

Mass Communication, 'Mass Culture', Semiotics: Umberto Eco

Jonathan Smith, Swansea University, UK.

Abstract: Eco's work in semiotics responds to a perception that the development of mass media drastically transforms the conditions of communication and culture in the twentieth century; but it remains foreign to the common idiom of Media and Cultural Studies despite echoing, anticipating, or exceeding some of their most radical advances. Successive sections highlight Eco's criticism, circa 1964, of the traditional dichotomy between 'high' and 'popular' culture, his development of a model of mass communication which emphasises negotiation of meaning rather than its imposition on audiences, and this model's openness to a critical theory of subjectivity informed by psychoanalysis as well as by original work in narratology and aesthetics. Yet this work of reconstruction would be unnecessary, were not the conditions of mass communication which the project addresses also, insofar as they shape its expression and transmission between national cultures and markets, potent obstacles to its audibility.

Keywords: mass communication, media criticism, popular culture, Cultural Studies, democracy, semiotics, architecture, subjectivity, aesthetics.

Like some characteristic concerns of his journalism, the main lines of Eco's theoretical enquiry emerge from early (and under-exposed, but pioneering) work on mass communication: their critical force depends on our re-connecting them with the problems they initially address. The difficulties of this task are partly due to the special circumstances of his complex oeuvre's production, especially in the early stages, but partly to exacerbation of its complexity by the manner of its international dissemination: this paper aims at clarification in both respects.

Eco graduated in 1954, specialising in philosophical aesthetics, and was employed for much of the decade by the Italian state broadcasting company RAI, which began regular national TV transmissions the same year: both experiences are key to what follows. Working from 1959 as editorial consultant to the Milanese publisher Bompiani, Eco meanwhile embarked on a career of scholarship and journalism, and from 1962 university teaching. Based in Bologna from the 1970s, he was named Professor of Semiotics in 1975, and since 1980 his fiction has further stimulated a small academic industry to survey his contributions to the field (for samples, see Capozzi, 1997; Caesar, 1999; Ross & Sibley, 2004; for readers of Italian and French respectively, Magli et al., 1992 and Petitot & Fabbri, 2000). Yet their scope exceeds what is commonly recognised even in the specialist literature: despite scattered references, the ground covered below is not accessible via any combination of Hawkes (1977); Hodge & Kress (1988); Cobley (2001); Chandler (2002), while the survey of structuralism in Sturrock (2003: 74-97) includes a chapter on semiotics apparently counting Eco an orthodox follower of Peirce, although if any such existed, they would not be structuralists in Sturrock's sense, and Eco anyway is neither. Yet however arcane the theoretical work might appear, and however far it strays from its starting point, it is catalysed by the introduction of television, by the other profound and convulsive changes in Italian society this accompanies and rapidly comes to symbolise, and by the intellectual culture's difficulties in dealing with them as they occur (for social and cultural context, see Asor Rosa, 1989; Woolf, 1989; Baranski & Lumley, 1990; Ginsborg, 1990 and 2003; Lumley, 1990; Forgacs & Lumley, 1996, provide a succinct outline). Conversely, Italy's brusque experience of modernisation triggers Eco's vivid expression of a cluster of problems concerning 'mass communications and theories of mass culture', in a series of occasional essays collected in a single volume in 1964 to support his application for a specialist academic position (Eco, 1997a).

In view of its improvised nature and the ephemerality of some of its subject matter, only fragments of Apocalittici e integrati (literally, 'Apocalyptic and Integrated Intellectuals') have appeared in English: Eco (1994a) (the nearest to equivalent volume) includes only some retrospective introductory material from the 1970s, the original preface, and a short essay on Peanuts, plus various extraneous materials from the period 1964-86. The important essay on Kitsch (1997a: 65-129) appears in Eco (1989: 180-216), that on Steve Canyon (131-83) elsewhere as Eco (1976a), and that on Superman (219-61) in Eco (1979: 107-24), all three sufficiently abridged to deplete the sense. Material on 'Mass culture and "levels" of culture' (1997a: 29-64), the aesthetics of typicality (187-218), recorded and broadcast music (275-316), television (317-57), and popular culture (361-85) is not available in English; what is, exhibits a variety of strategy as well as quality in translation representative of the problems posed by Eco's English-language bibliography. Despite its textual complexities, this material is here a major exhibit; for accessibility's sake, English-language versions only are cited wherever this does not impede the argument.

Eco's path-breaking observation around 1964 (considered in section 1) is that modern technologies and economies of cultural production and communication demand fresh thinking about the production and exchange of meanings, including but not limited to re-conceptualisation of the coexistence and interaction of canonical and popular culture in terms more flexible than the received dichotomy between 'high' and 'low'. This initiates an engagement in semiotic theory (outlined in section 2) oriented towards materialist definition of the conditions of a democratic culture, already addressing problems which under the overlapping rubrics of Media and Cultural Studies have been pursued into the new millennium: three surveys adopted here as points of reference, each consolidating a field sufficiently broad to be of enduring interest and value, are, Easthope (1991); Frow (1995) and Couldry (2000). This is to say that the difficulties already noted in registering the coherence and scope of Eco's theoretical investigation are not purely abstract ones: they are obstacles to recognising conceptual resources offered to fields of enquiry frequently distinguished by claims to political and existential urgency (for instance reiterated by, Easthope, Frow, and Couldry at least in this alike).
His enquiry commits Eco by degrees to construing subjectivity as a dispersed, mobile ensemble of semiotic processes and competences, open to revision and expansion: education, and culture, are necessary components of a democracy substantively rather than formally defined, because they are indispensable means of access to reflexive participation in it. Yet this principle of semiotic corrigibility requires important qualifications, acknowledged by Eco with varying degrees of directness. Some, particularly prominent in work of the 1960s, are economic or sociological in character. Others emerge from scattered annotations of subjectivity's constitutive need to believe itself a transcendent unity: this is cited in 1964 as an obstacle to recognising the role of technology and the market in cultural production, but is also registered less directly by intermittent forays into the frontier territory of semiotics with psychoanalysis. These considerations are drawn together in section 3, with a view to an elucidation of the architecture and standing of Eco's enquiry here only sketched.

1. - 'A civilization of mutants': re-defining mass culture

Although widely reviewed - positively and negatively - as giving unprecedentedly serious attention to contemporary popular culture, much of Apocalittici e integrati addresses the previous literature, Italian, French, German, and American: the title refers to categories of intellectuals respectively opposed and committed to contemporary technologies and economies of popular cultural production. In arguing a more nuanced position, Eco borrows from both camps, and is easily read as falling into either, happily or otherwise according to readers' sympathies: apocalyptic anxiety and the temptations of integration are reported arising from aspects of mass communication too varied, and too open to conflicting interpretations, to be organised into a single, coherent, exposition. The relative salience of these concerns varies between essays, but the earliest one sketching apocalyptic and integrated positions condenses them onto the singular novelty of television, likened in its potential for good or ill, according to the quality of its management, to nuclear energy (1997a: 356).

The introduction of television in Italy is in other words the occasion rather than the cause of anxieties which Eco surveys from various standpoints, at one stage referring to Plato's tale (in the Phaedrus) of King Thamus's response to the god Thoth's gift of writing, that it will deplete the power of memory: new cultural technologies 'act in the context of a humanity profoundly modified, both by the causes which have brought them into being, and by their use. Even as reconstructed in the Platonic myth, the invention of writing is one example; others are that of printing, or the new audiovisual media' (1997a: 30; my translation). Eco's demand is then that contemporary developments be exposed to critical judgement, and considered management, on the basis of relevant rather than anachronistic criteria: several essays denounce a 'humanism' inherited from the Renaissance, but the problem finds its most focused definition in the preface (1994a: 17-35).

Rather than as a derogatory term designating a realm of technical and economic necessity from which a more authentic culture might be differentiated, Eco appropriates 'mass culture' as a name for an environment where the technical and commercial processes of the 'culture industry' play so determining a part that neither apocalyptic jeremiads, nor his own counter-arguments, are conceivable apart from it: they belong to 'mass culture' by definition. Whereas the apocalyptics foster nostalgia for a freedom from this condition now impossible, the democratic culture envisaged by Eco would be one of freedom within it, not simply for a cultivated elite, but for the generality of its inhabitants. Where the apocalyptics see an undifferentiated 'mass', and the integrated are complicit in attempting to constitute one, the more effectively to extract profit from it, Eco urges on the aspirant media critic sensitivity to the existence of 'a multitude of peoples and races with whom he is still not fully acquainted, for he is living in a civilization of mutants' (1994a: 31). Metaphors of racial and species difference relative to anachronistic 'humanist' ideals of cultural competence and disposition recur regularly throughout the volume, articulating a demand for social-scientific ('anthropological') study of cultural difference, and change in progress: recognition of powerful factors of cultural change (and possibly homogenisation) is matched by acknowledgement of largely unknown ones of difference (and possibly differentiation). One purpose of investigation is to foster negotiation between them.

Despite allusions to Renaissance humanism, the conceptions of humankind and culture cherished by the apocalyptics and challenged by Eco are primarily idealist ones, represented in the 1964 preface by the closing page of Adorno's Minima Moralia - perhaps unjustly, since more than the Frankfurt School itself, Eco's polemic target is an early reception of its work in the terms of the Italian culture of the time. Nonetheless, he sporadically associates Adorno's conceptuality, and Horkheimer's, with that of Marx's Young Hegelian interlocutors, lodging a rhetorical claim to Marxist orthodoxy less significant in itself, since he elsewhere shows little commitment to Marxism either in politics or theory, than as one in a series of declarations of democratic, rational, and materialist intent, developed piecemeal over time. This is for instance the sense of appeals already made elsewhere to Dewey, and to Piaget, with a view to establishing the centrality of embodiment to human culture (Eco, 1989: 24-43, 44-83, 123-57). In all these cases, what is primarily at issue is the legacy of Croce's idealism, which had been a powerful obstacle to the development of social science in Italy generally, and long preoccupies Eco, who into the 1970s continues endorsing Croce's aesthetics qua description of the experience of works of art, while seeking to remedy its explanatory deficiencies (on Croce's aesthetics, see Brand & Pertile 1999: 509-11, with Eco, 1989: 25 and 160, and 1976b: 256 and 262; in a more sociological key, Eco later re-phrases the problem, as one of Croce's formulating a lowest common denominator of response in pseudo-technical language (1997c: 375-87, omitted from Eco 1999); on the larger problem concerning social science, see Forgacs & Lumley, 1996: 3).

This attempt to give aesthetics renewed rational substance rapidly merges into a larger project of theorising human culture, in its entirety, as following rationally specifiable rules, and charting the extent to which, being defined by human agency, these are also available to modification by it, or else emerge from nature and are not. These problems find a succession of different formulations, each differing in various respects from other writers', but they define the scope of Eco's semiotic enquiry. Insofar as it includes and exceeds that of aesthetics, this is first outlined in Apocalittici, where a recurrent risk is first run, of exaggerating in the identification of culture as a zone of freedom. In repudiating 'apocalyptic' allegations of mass culture's malignant homogeneity, Eco contributes more than has been recognised to the 'historically hard-learned perception ... of readers or spectators of texts as actively engaging with and constructing textual meaning (and themselves as subjects in the process), ... refusing the argument that texts impose meaning, that they unilaterally shape the consciousness or political opinions of their readers' (Frow, 1995: 69). Yet by moving in that direction, and despite some tentativeness, Apocalittici sets a course of deviation away from fully registering what Frow calls the 'constraints within which textual choice is possible', which are primarily those of 'a system of commodity production' (ibid: 70). Frow claims 'both positions are "correct", but there is no way of reconciling them in a single perspective', so that selecting either is 'by definition to fail to perform the countervailing analysis' (ibid.); but his broader argument (for revised definitions of social class, cultural capital, and cultural value) makes less purchase on this problem than does the proposal of an 'imbricated paradigm' (Easthope, 1991: 129-39), within which semiotic and sociological frames of reference, among several others including a psychoanalytic one, each assume a mobile relation to the others, according to the requirements of any particular analysis. Sections 2 and 3 will identify some occasions when Eco, more or less directly, acknowledges a need for semiotics to be placed in such relations of mutual complementarity with other types of conceptualisation.

Eco's conception of democracy in Apocalittici is more than purely formal, but weakly defined. Rapidly surveying print culture from the first Biblical woodcuts to the introduction of newspapers, the preface notes the mutual conditioning of the relevant technologies by the receptive capacities of the expanded, and in principle universal, literate publics they bring into being, and of these publics' inward life and outward behaviour by those technologies (1997a: 20-23). This closely links the emergence of modern conceptions and practices of democracy to that of 'mass culture': one of Eco's principal complaints against the 'apocalyptics' is that their unreasoned rejection of the latter entails rejection of the former. With a consistency more overt than in the theoretical work, this linkage of democracy with a certain style of rationality has been maintained in Eco's journalism, which since the 1960s has ranged widely over matters of social, cultural and political concern (media included), consistently viewed from a position on the non-aligned left (for ease of reference, discussion here is largely based on Eco 1998, especially vi-x, and 87-180, although this is a very restricted selection from three selections, themselves restricted, published in Italian between 1973 and 1983: see Caesar, 1999: 174).

Writing for an American audience, Eco presents his journalistic practice as arising from a European conception of the scholar's rights and duties, claiming his theoretical and journalistic work are distinct, but mutually dependent. In practice, however, what they most obviously share is the broad commitment to principles of systematic rational analysis espoused in 1964, contra apocalyptic and integrated positions alike: intermittently informed by semiotics, the journalism has also regularly emphasised other instruments, including sociological and psychoanalytic ones, for the dispersal of malign ignorance, in Italian but also, notably, in American society, and in politics and religion as much as in aesthetics. Regular if infrequent citation of d'Alembert and Diderot in theoretical texts signals persistent commitment to Enlightenment values, tempered by recognition that their applicability is limited, local, and provisional: Eco, 1984b: 80-84 is more accessible linguistically (if not conceptually) than 1997a: 351 (where the Encyclopédie is cited as a landmark venture in mass communication) or 1997c: xii (omitted in translation, although the chapter 'On Being' which immediately follows is as stringent as the journalism in urging critical response to the slogans and fashions of postmodernism (1999: 12-56)). Only devotees of such fashion will be surprised that Eco responds to the waning of revolutionary hope during the 1970s and 1980s with an analysis of power in contemporary societies, whether exercised through the media or elsewhere, informed by Foucault among other authors: too dispersed to be confronted or seized wholesale, it can at most be divided and turned against itself, piecemeal, by local negotiation. Although Foucault is rumoured to have excluded such possibilities, Eco's reading is supported by Frow's succinct corrective (1995: 55; 62), which must here stand in for more extensive survey of Foucault's texts and reception.

Apocalittici, already eschewing revolutionary prescription, envisages media research shaping practitioners' 'democratic' response to audiences' wishes, needs and capacities, reconciling information and education with entertainment in the context of a market economy. The subsequent history of the media in Italy has frustrated these aspirations (for a journalistic acknowledgment, originally dating from a key moment in the consolidation of the Berlusconi empire, see Eco, 1990a); but it has not eliminated the crucial ambiguity of 'mass' culture identified by Frow. In refusing idealist conceptions of culture, Apocalittici trenchantly refuses the familiar, elitist and typically individualist, 'opposition between mass-produced "low" culture and "high" culture which was understood to transcend commodity production' (Frow, 1995: 13), and avoids the reversal (endemic at lower levels of theoretical sophistication than Frow's or Easthope's) which privileges 'popular' culture as the expression of an idealised community: such variations on this theme as Apocalittici registers fall under the heading of 'integrated' apologetics, in bad faith or deluded. Despite intermittent uncertainties, Eco brings unrecognised energy to these problems, which remain central to his research over an extended period.

2. - Re-inventing semiotics

In 1964, inherited conceptions of 'mass culture' still suggest imposition of meanings by one antagonistic social class on another: 'members of the working class consume bourgeois cultural models while believing them to be the independent expression of their own class' (Eco, 1994a: 29). Eco's metaphor of a civilisation of mutants signals an incipient disruption of these inter-linked dichotomous models, of social relations and of the production and reception of meanings, which will focus increasingly on textuality. Yet still today, semiotics is commonly confused with expositions of structuralism which rather support the model of imposed than one of negotiated meaning (see Couldry, 2000: 74-76, and Chandler, 2002: 207-19). Where conversely it is argued that the operations and effects of textuality exceed what can be inferred from social context, let alone one represented in terms of class antagonism, and that a more developed semiotics is therefore of central importance (Easthope, 1991: 65-66, 74, 107-28, 130), Eco's contribution has remained unexplored, his differences with structuralism obscured by the reception history of the notorious, early, essay on Fleming's James Bond novels (Eco, 1979: 144-72): despite making instrumental use of it (1991: 66), Easthope elsewhere criticises Eco's essay as a canonical instance of structuralism (1988: 26-32). Frow underwrites comparable criticisms from another source, but characterises the essay's alleged shortcomings as a matter of cultural history rather than 'failure of insight' (1995: 132-33): neither author registers that the essay presupposes that on Steve Canyon discussed below, and is limited to reconstructing textual evidence for a (hypothetical) authorial strategy rather than asserting its real effects. Even forceful presentations of semiotics as a key area of investigation into current social and cultural change acknowledge Eco without registering his emphasis on the social negotiation of meaning, across media extending well beyond the range of applicability of structuralist models based on verbal language (Hodge & Kress, 1988; Kress, 2001).

Outlined in the 1964 preface, Eco's initial engagement with semiotics is developed, and contextualised, more fully in the slightly earlier essay built around a reading of the first episode, dated 1947, of Milton Caniff's comic strip Steve Canyon. Given Caniff's success in attracting up to 30,000 readers daily to his previous series Terry and the Pirates, Eco reasons that the need to establish this new one should command all his communicative resources, which can therefore be studied with special precision in these first eleven frames. This study is followed by a more general descriptive survey of the visual and verbal language of comics, preliminary to broader enquiries outlined in thirty-one pages amputated from the English translation (compare Eco, 1976a with 1997a: 130-83).

The principal concept deployed is that of the repertoire of primarily graphic conventions inferred by Eco from the work of Caniff and other mid-twentieth-century American comic-strip artists; yet despite designating this a 'code', Eco does not cite any particular authority for this usage, and is cautious of its implications. It does not, for example, account for the competences of real audiences, but only for those assumed as a working hypothesis by artists: it therefore cannot tell researchers anything about the real effects of any given text on a 'mass' audience. Far from guaranteeing identification of textual features significant for particular sections of an audience inevitably differentiated by class, education, age, sex, psychological profile, culture, and nationality, or for such audiences' (perhaps correspondingly) differentiated interpretations, analytical acuity is potentially deceptive. Whereas the European tradition from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century was able to legislate against aberrant response to artworks because a relatively closed canon established the criteria of its own reception for a relatively closed community, twentieth-century mass communication solicits and meets a broader range of responses from more diverse audiences, so that those of expert analysts enjoy no special privilege. Analysis of the kind essayed on Caniff's work belongs only to the preparatory phase of a programme of empirical audience research by interdisciplinary teams, aiming to assess the uniformity or diversity of audience response relative to semiotic hypotheses such as Eco's, but also to assist in forming cultural and educational policies promoting development and diversification of cultural disposition and competence. This larger project is neither sustained nor (as later work testifies) sustainable in this form, but the preliminary study signals the problems Eco's semiotic research is initially designed to address, and this accounts for much of its subsequent, rewarding, complexity.

For instance, Eco's immediate move beyond Steve Canyon, to review the 'code' of the 'autonomous literary sub-genre' to which it belongs (Eco, 1976a: 2), rather questions than confirms two established (and associated) oppositions, between verbal and visual communication, and between 'high' and 'popular' culture (on their characteristic association, see Easthope, 1991: 75-103). Features catalogued include comics' highly condensed verbal and graphic representation of speech, thought, and emotion, the interaction of verbal and visual significations within frames, and the rules of frames' sequential combination or montage (comparable to those operating in film, but different). Also considered are plot types, including 'cinematic' or serial ones such as Caniff's, continuing from one episode to the next, and 'iterative' ones, exemplified by Superman and Peanuts, where each episode is a separate narrative unity, together with typologies of stereotyped characters, and the 'ideology', or universe of (in Caniff's case, conformist) values, presented. Such repertoires borrow and are borrowed from by others which they sometimes trivialise but sometimes revivify, in a manner only open to judgement case by case: there is no impervious boundary between this area of popular culture and the Futurist painting (Boccioni & Co.) with which it shares conventions for the representation of bodily movement, or the more recent experimental cinema, including Godard's, which shifts away from classical montage towards the more staccato rhythms of comics.

This mutual permeability of 'high' and 'low' genres hints at a more flexible concept of code in prospect, and a more fluid economy of values outlined elsewhere in Apocalittici (and further explored in section 3 below); but it also prompts questions whether the medium is intrinsically limited to stereotyped characterisation, and to the conformism of Caniff's portrayal of an 'American way of life tinged with the Hollywood Legend' (1976a: 32). Eco re-phrases these to question the constraints placed on producers by contingencies of industrial production, in particular to match plot structures to the requirement to publish in daily or weekly instalments, as well as on readers by texts; but he is no more disposed to answer the first than the second unequivocally. Steve Canyon tends to represent a standard which Superman fails to reach, aesthetically or ideologically, but which Peanuts exceeds, chiefly because of Schulz's skill in converting constraints into expressive opportunities. These are not distinctions between high and low culture, but within a semantic (and cognitive) repertoire of typologies of plot and character developed further elsewhere in Apocalittici: 'typical' plots and characterisations, through whatever medium transmitted, make explicit the formation of character over time and in context, whereas stereotypical ones tend to conceal it (Eco, 1997a: 187-218, unavailable in English but studied closely in Smith, 2006a).

Centrally, however, the essay on Steve Canyon concerns the slippage between a text's preferred meaning as it might be stipulated by its producers or inferred by analysts, and the range of meanings it may assume for different audiences. Whereas 'code' here designates a repertoire of primarily graphic devices associated with preferred meaning, but as yet entails no commitment as to how this association arises, Eco (1976b) conceptualises codes as biplanar systems of material 'expression' and semantic 'content' whose correlation occurs during sign production, in a broad sense including reception as well as transmission of texts (now construed as referring to multiple codes). One result is that reception at odds with preferred meaning can be theorised systematically as the application of discrepant codes: Eco considers this an intrinsic characteristic of contemporary mass communication, which it is among the defining tasks of semiotics to elucidate (ibid: 13). Another consequence is that the received dichotomy between conventional and motivated signs (at its crudest in that between the verbal and the visual), and thus between verbal texts and those which are such in a broader metaphorical sense, can be supplemented by a more flexible classification of modes of sign production, ranging from recognition of expressions bearing meanings which are culturally encoded (but also in varying ways and degrees motivated), via their ostension and replication, to their invention. Thirdly, since transmission or reception of texts involves processes of several of these different types, simultaneously, they account for a range of effects of 'ideological' constraint and creative freedom, eliminating any need to opt between these. Fourthly, this means codes can only be formalised for purposes of a specific analysis, since formalisation itself may cause change: rather than the metaphysical ones sometimes alleged (for example in Carravetta, 1997), codes are strictly theoretical entities.

This is a pioneering formulation designed to exceed the limitations Eco and others have attributed to the 'semiological' tradition looking to Saussure as its founder, achieved partly through a reading of Peirce which alternates between criticism, adoption, and adaptation of his ideas: Eco (1976b) addresses problems overlapping (but exceeding) Volosinov (1973), whose classic treatment is briefly championed, then dropped on the (puzzling) grounds that it has not been digested within Cultural Studies, in Couldry (2000: 74) (for more substantial discussion of Saussure and Volosinov, acknowledging the latter's affinities with Peirce (but not Eco), see Hodge & Kress, 1988: 13-36; and in defence of Saussure, Thibault, 1997). The book's extreme theoretical abstraction conceals from monolingual English-language readers its direct response to problems encountered during an earlier, critical, review of structuralist semiology, and of its limited power to formulate conventional rules governing communication in domains where the relevance of conventional rules or of communication itself had previously been in question: visual images, and architecture (see Eco, 1976b: vii-viii on its genesis from attempts, overtaken by revision of the original work beyond recognition, to translate into English Eco, 1980 [1968], of whose five sections, A, B, and E exist in English only as re-worked in 1976b; chapter D4 (of six) appears as Eco, 1989: 217-35, and section C, under the inappropriate section heading 'Structuralism', as 1997b, and, less drastically abridged as Eco, 1973). Both visual and architectural investigations alternate between exceeding the ambitions of the precursory work surveyed, and judging them excessive, countenancing but then dismissing analysis according to the model of the double articulation of verbal language, as a system of differences without positive terms, sufficient in themselves to define the signifiers of a monoplanar code whose signifieds inhere in them in virtue of Saussure's principle of value (on double articulation, see Chandler, 2002: 10-11; on value in Saussure, 22-25).

This intermittently ultra-structuralist project founders on the difficulties of analysing images or architecture in these terms, but appears doomed by the introductory section A's argument that even in respect of verbal language, the doctrine of the unity of the signifier and the signified in the sign is inadequate to account for those dimensions of meaning formulated in Eco (1976b). Section A already outlines both Peirce's conception of interpretation, and the principles of inference from circumstance and context which govern Eco's use of it henceforth, developing the argument of the 'Reading of Steve Canyon' in directions Eco pursues into the 1990s, and co-ordinating it closely with an exposition of the principle of subjectivity's semiotic corrigibility: the contrary postulate of a context-free unity of signifier and signified is construed as setting arbitrary 'ideological' limits to what can be said, communicated, or indeed thought by users passively 'spoken' by the code (or structure, since the terms are here synonymous). These concepts are therefore useful diagnostic tools insofar as they can expose the artificiality of such limits, but dangerous ones when taken to confirm them, deterministically. The slightly later 'epistemological' section D accordingly argues an interpretation of structure as a 'methodological' fiction, and constructs an elaborate philosophical contextualisation to discredit Lévi-Strauss's tendency to interpret it as an 'ontological' reality (on problems posed by section D, see Caesar, 2004: 161-66). Yet this polemic is less important here than its legacy to later work: even when Eco purports to revert to a pre-Saussurean conception of the sign incorporating the factor of inferential interpretation into its definition (Eco, 1984b: 15-45), the code's content plane is still ascribed a differential structure, albeit one only locally and provisionally organised, and emphasis now falls on its utility for purposes of communication rather than analysis (ibid: 84-86). In this limited sense, Eco remains committed to structuralism's legacy despite working to revise it from section A onwards (see 1976b: 26-28 on the scope of structural semantics, and 1999: 251-54 on the productive tension between this position and the 'cognitive-interpretative semiotics of Peirce').

In contrast with section A's productivity, section B diversifies into incidental discussions of cinema, avant-garde visual arts, and the interaction of image and text in magazine and billboard advertising, after refusing problems concerning iconicity and perception later developed in the context of Eco's continuing reading of Peirce (1976b; 1999). By contrast again, section C is a fertile intervention in architectural theory which shatters against the same intractable blockage Frow finds afflicting studies of popular culture; it is also seminal for the development of Eco's semiotics, positively as well as in thus identifying some of its limits. Like much of Apocalittici, section C assumes the standpoint of practitioners, primarily addressing a specialist student audience, in terms influenced by Lynch (for an overview of whose work, see Bannerjee & Southworth, 1990). Conceived in the aftermath of substantial population movements from rural to urban areas of Italy around 1960, section C presents a Utopian programme for practice in fields of architecture and planning massively over-determined by economics, politics, nostalgic aestheticism, and professional mystique. This may account for Eco's having barely returned to the topic: even section C itself is somewhat burdened by its review of previous work effectively limited to cataloguing configurations whose functional (and in this sense semantic) value is so fixed as to prompt a provisional conclusion that architectural creativity is blocked by 'ideological' limitations of the kind outlined in section A. Eco's response, largely erased from the English-language abridgement (1997b), is to shift attention away from signifying form, first towards historical variations in the practical and symbolic functions of existing structures and traditional designs, and then onto the design process, conceived as basing itself on an initial survey of prospective users' needs and desires sufficiently broad to generate designs able to accommodate them as they change.

This is presented as a principle of democratic and durable design, but since the argument is introduced by equating the relation of architectural form to its practical and symbolic functions with that of signifier to signified, it also has the collateral effect that these are here for the first time construed as separate systems of 'expression' and 'content' whose correlations may change from context to context or time to time. This evades concerns already voiced in the essay on Steve Canyon, that semiotic methods adopted without regard to the broader context of research risk straightforward description or justification of given data, and Tschumi's overlapping one, that architectural semiotics capsizes into conservative legitimation of closed and anachronistic visual vocabularies at the expense of considerations of built structure or use; but it overcompensates, generalising a design philosophy comparable to that developed by Tschumi himself, yet dubiously applicable beyond enclaves protected against the burdens of tradition and the market (see Tschumi, 1996: 142 and 229-31 on semiotics, and 173-205 on the experimental (and uncompleted) Parc de la Villette project; this is usefully complemented by the diagnosis of the state of architecture given by an outsider in Jameson, 1991: 1-54 and 154-81, which resonates with one pole of section C's argument as Tschumi does with the other). So conflicted is section C, it ultimately lapses into a dystopia excised from 1997b, documenting the consequences of failure to enact its prescriptions by reference to the model city of Brasilia attracting influxes of population, unforeseen by the planners, which their plan could neither accommodate, nor survive.

Stimulated by practical problems as Eco's first engagement with semiotics had been by the growth of industrially produced popular culture, section C oscillates between the equally legitimate but mutually incompatible perspectives later identified by Frow, spawning the theory of sign production in embryo as it does so. This movement is predicated on explicit argument that architecture shares several defining characteristics of mass communication: subordination to market forces, penetration into the textures of everyday life, rapid obsolescence, and alternation between coercion, and permitting a range of improvised response. Section C and Apocalittici share, and transmit to later work, this scepticism about such coercion's viability: mass communication is viewed virtually throughout as meeting with inevitable interference, given both in the variable correlation of 'expression' with 'content', and increasingly also in variations in the latter's structural organisation. This is reflected in successive modified prescriptions for media research, sketched below, in section 3; but it also reflects the shifting emphasis of Eco's theoretical work, away from codes and towards the inferential procedures by which they are established, whether in contexts of formal analysis or informal interpretation.

Increasingly subsumed under Peirce's term 'abduction', these processes are also progressively diversified by sustained critical reading of his fragmentary studies, until Eco's revised, inferential, definition of the sign replaces the code as the theory's central organising concept (compare Eco, 1984b: 14-45 with 1976b: 129-39 and 1983; for commentary, see Deeley, 1997 and Petrilli, 1997). Turning on the principle of 'unlimited semiosis' already canvased (Eco, 1980 [1968]: 36; 1976b: 68-72), such that any sign's meaning is given by inference from context, and translation into one or more overlapping signs which position the first within a semantic field whose provisional structure is partly derived from this provisional positioning, this re-definition of the sign also leads an expansion of section A's argument (reiterated in B and C with reference to advertising professionals and architects) that institutionalised codes lay (and legitimate) constraints on the subject of communication. Despite its applicability in limited cases, the principle of coded equivalence between sign (or signifier) and meaning supports 'a sclerotic (and ideological) notion of the subject', while in practice the metalinguistic and otherwise metasemiotic use of language means that subjectivity (once disabused of such notions) finds itself 'constantly reshaped by the endless resegmentation of the content' (1984b: 45). The civilisation of mutants, in 1964 a metaphor, is now a literal reality: although the intended applications of the new argument extend beyond analysis of mass communication (see 1984b: 1-13), Eco here rationalises the persistent margin of freedom within the system of cultural commodities underscored by Frow, locating it within the structure of subjectivity itself.

3. - The work of art in the age of mass communication

Eco canvases the mutual implication of sign and subjectivity as early as section A, incisively engaging it with his original specialism in aesthetics: re-formulating the enquiry without reference to this would trivialise it no less than does reading Eco as a literary theorist without reference to the broader theoretical enquiry. Such readings (amply documented by material cited in my introduction) commonly efface the distinction between a strand of narratological theory whose focus on a preponderance of predictability over unpredictability in narrative development (and correlative confirmation of subjective and objective certainties) diverges from that of the aesthetics on effects of multiple, persistent, ambiguity; they tend additionally to efface a recurrent focus (despite the relative density of literary examples and bibliography) on the inscription of narrative and aesthetic functions in musical, pictorial, and architectural works, and the significance of their co-occurrence, in tension with each other, in literary and cinematic narratives. They typically also amputate this entire argument from its roots in Apocalittici, and in the context of mass communication.

Eco commonly defines the artwork in terms (borrowed from Jakobson) of multiple ambiguities, given in the strategies of modern works or the historical distance of classic ones, and eliciting inferences as to their codes. These conjectures undergo successive revisions by reference to each other, re-structuring the codes brought to bear by readers, and thus the structures of meaning defining both objective reality and subjective identity. In this way among others, section A scouts the mutual implication of sign and subject formalised in 1984b, already shifting away from a Formalist towards a hermeneuticist aesthetics declared such only in the 1990s (compare 1999: 32-35, acknowledging Heidegger, with Easthope, 1991: 58, based on 1976a: 261-76, which in turn will gain elsewhere by comparison with preliminary expositions in Eco, 1980 [1968]: 61-99 and 259-84 and the historicised one of 1984b: 130-63). Fabbri 1992 appositely proposes orientation relative to both Gadamer and Derrida, but no more straightforward homogeneity is achieved with either than maintained with Jakobson; for English-language contextualisation of some of the problems involved, without reference to Eco, see Clark 1992.

Section A also raises a question how the 'aesthetic idiolect' governing the work's ambiguities across various levels of material realisation and denotative and connotative meaning can be known, to which there is no immediate solution since knowledge develops only by successive approximations which cannot in principle be concluded. Eco eventually invokes the consensus of a community of competent investigators to which Peirce delegates responsibility for a truth always in prospect and never definitively achieved (Eco 1990: 1-63; on Peirce, see Diggins, 1994: 158-204). 'Poststructuralist' objections commonly interpret this as an argument for forced consensus in the present: exemplary premature appeal to deconstruction is made by Birchall, 2004 staging confrontations with Derrida and Lyotard which require more sustained readings of all three authors than can be presented there (or here), but tending to adopt arguments closer to Eco's own than she acknowledges while taxing him with differing from them, and to neglect the thematic densities of this entire body of work. Eco rather attempts to account for the possibility of interpretative debate and dissent of varying degrees of cogency, than to suppress them: despite the enquiry's continuing evolution, it remains directed, here as in literalising the metaphor of a civilisation of mutants, towards conceptualising some of the conditions and limits of a democratic culture (for commentary on some relatively informal texts from Eco, 2005 see Smith, 2006b). In this connection, insistence from around 1990 on the limits of interpretation does little more than re-define problems posed in work of the 1960s and 1970s.

Any interpretation of these arguments as idealist ones, would conflict with Eco's regular insistence on the continuity of culture with nature, from early disputes with Croce to recent work on perception, although criticism has formulated this problem by questioning the compatibility of his work with psychoanalysis (the locus classicus is de Lauretis 1980, its ambivalence articulated in English in de Lauretis, 1984 and 1997; see also Caesar, 1999: 106-107, and 2004: 165). Yet Eco responds by emphasising their mutual complementarity, in a spirit of return to Freud from Lacan and Kristeva: this is an area where Eco's work leaves frontiers open to further explorations which have barely begun (see Eco, 1976b: 314-18, and 1984b: 24-26, 43-45, 94-103 and 134-40, but note that the phraseology of 1984a is significantly more hospitable to psychoanalysis; direct compatibility is argued by Violi, 2005; for a preliminary integration of this problem with that of distinguishing the narratology from the aesthetics, see Smith, 2006a). Apocalittici already in various respects accommodates the openness most explicit around 1984, underlining (like section C's internal tensions) the degree to which Eco's enquiry solicits the 'imbricated paradigm' Easthope advocates: I return to this below, after sketching some developments in Eco's broader view of mass communication and culture.

Eco's commitment to exploring the freedoms left open by the economic and technological determinants of 'mass' culture does not entail discounting any scope for effective action on or through the media themselves, although his assessment of this has fluctuated. Around 1964, 'democratic' culture is pragmatically defined as maximising the ratio of information communicated to profit extracted on the basis of research yet to be undertaken into audiences' capacities and demands. This presupposes a commitment of (some) media professionals to the communication of information (or culture) to audiences about which little is yet known, as a good in itself: anecdotal arguments for its practicability are drawn from fields where Eco already had direct experience (academic publishing, television broadcasting), but the question is barely posed how communication might be maximised quantitatively or optimised qualitatively, although it is registered (primarily with reference to aesthetic rather than purely informational genres) that this would be a matter of social (and political) organisation of education and leisure, as well as of the media (1997a: 47-58).

In 1967, Italian publication of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man brings the Frankfurt School new popularity, and perceptions that power is exercised more through the media than the armed forces or police capsize Eco's faith in the benevolent leadership of intellectuals into left-apocalyptic demonisation of mass communication: its disruption by constant scrutiny of its codes at the point of reception is 'the only salvation for free people' (1998: 135-44). Yet beside recognising that each channel of communication interacts with others (for instance, television with the press), to disrupt or be disrupted and control or be controlled by them, this plea for a 'semiological guerrilla warfare' already registers that mass communication is subject anyway to the interference of reception according to discrepant codes. Even before he fully registers the fact, Eco's semiotics erodes the dystopian prospect of confrontation between a monolithic 'strategy' of power and 'tactics' of resistance, although this rhetoric persists (1976b: 150), in all probability independently of Certeau's more familiar usage, critically reviewed by Frow (1995: 47-69).

By 1973, after almost twenty years' television, the single cultural system posited in 1964 seems more real than it did then, but less disastrously so than in 1967: a combined retrospect and prospectus for future research begins by noting that the generation of 1968 was the first of the television age (Eco, 1994a: 87-102). Interpreting others' more empirical research through the lens of his own theoretical work on sub-systems of semiotic 'content', Eco highlights both the increasing role of the media in shaping these, and practical deficits of competence, together with proven scope for educational action to remedy them, among broadcasters as well as their audiences. It is now more difficult than previously to construe their relationship as one between colonists and colonised, and Eco closes by recommending that future studies be conceived neither with a view to maximising audience penetration (or resistance), nor to cultural homogenisation through broadcasting or education, but to enabling mutual clarification across multiple lines of cultural differentiation, horizontal as well as vertical. As the 1970s continue, anxieties about control of information subside, thanks to (limited) political diversification of the RAI, legalisation of independent radio, and the persistence of a broadly based counter-culture after 1968. In 1977, Eco responds to these developments by re-asserting the production-centred perspective of Apocalittici, disavowed in 1967: 'if you write books on mass communication you have to accept that they're provisional - they can lose their relevance or regain it in a morning' (1997a: xv - my translation; contrast 1994a: 56: 'they may be up-to-date and then outdated in the space of a single morning').

Around this time, the conception of monolithic power, benign in 1964 and malignant in 1967, is displaced altogether: this is a phase of accentuated ambivalence and scepticism towards the Italian state (and the geopolitical and economic networks in which it and the United States are embedded), during which Eco interprets the terror and counter-terror of the 1970s in terms borrowed partly from Foucault (1998: 113-18, 173-79, 239-56). Striking at the heart of the state is a vain enterprise, for it has no central organ whose destruction would fatally compromise political or economic processes, nationally or internationally. Whereas Apocalittici already noted a blurring of distinctions between popular culture, advertising, and consumer goods (1997a: 221-26), the perspective of 1983 emphasises the way this locks cultural producers as well as consumers into a system where there is no identifiable seat of authority to challenge or overthrow (1998: 145-52), although remote-controlled switching between multiple channels has made the consumer into a producer 'of his own composition' (ibid: 148). At the same time, 'what the enlightened and enlightenment culture of the '60s was demanding' has been accomplished (ibid: 147), inasmuch as the residual dichotomy between elite and popular culture against which the 1964 preface struggled can no longer be justified by reference to distinct textual corpora, distinct competences addressed by them, or distinct audiences for them: 'high school kids know these things . . . professors of theory of communications, trained by the texts of twenty years ago (this includes me), should be pensioned off . . . we have to start again from the beginning' (ibid: 147; 149; 150; compare Frow, 1995: 68 and the material there reviewed).

Journalistic hyperbole aside, the assertion of the traditional dichotomy's superannuation chimes with a broad field of research published around the same time: a locus classicus cited by both Frow (1995: 24) and Lumley (introducing Eco, 1994a: 12) is Nowell-Smith (1987: 83): 'it is possible to say that there is one culture (albeit with divisions in it) or several cultures (overlapping and rubbing up against each other) but no longer that there are two cultures, high and popular ... I would probably opt for the view that there is one (multiply divided) culture and that within this culture the dominant position is occupied by forms traditionally designated as popular.' Yet apart from that of inter-active technology, the developments registered in 1983 are all (as the reference to 1960s Enlightenment culture suggests) within range of the analytical apparatus sketched in Apocalittici, which may therefore have a continuing relevance even greater than Eco's reappraisal of 1977 suggests.

Although Apocalittici initially argues its model of a single 'mass' culture against the dichotomous one, several essays are more nuanced: two, for instance, select Dwight MacDonald as a representative apocalyptic antagonist, because his three-term distinction between high, middle, and mass culture (the last two pejoratively dubbed Midcult and Masscult respectively) mediates a range of prejudices as to what defines cultural validity. Eco pragmatically adopts MacDonald's descriptive framework, to debate many of these associations (1997a: 51-54): it cannot, for instance, be empirically correlated with social class, or with greater and lesser structural complexity of works. In these cases, Eco assumes conclusions Frow still feels obliged to argue thirty years later (1995: 27-47; 133), but his most distinctive argument is that MacDonald's framework cannot be correlated with criteria of greater and lesser aesthetic value, since works of great prestige may be judged in some respect unsuccessful, and less prestigious ones, well made: this distinction between aesthetic and socially acknowledged values, further developed elsewhere in Apocalittici and beyond, is decisive.

Initially with a view to empirical sociological analysis, Apocalittici adopts a catalogue of five functions of artistic products, irrespective of their received classification in MacDonald's terms: entertainment, emotional catharsis, technical appreciation, metaphorical idealisation of the self and its situation, and their critical interpretation (1997a: 284-87). None is recommended, for any audience, to the exclusion of others, while scope is acknowledged for some of them to be fulfilled simultaneously with others, and for different audiences by works of different types: the questions posed are how widely and effectively society facilitates each, by circulating products which accommodate them, and by providing formal or informal education in the relevant cultural competences. For instance, the famous essay on Superman deems psychologically and socially constructive the entertainment, cathartic, and idealising functions of many popular products, provided their marketability not be allowed to drive out those which fulfil others. More generally, the answers to the critical questions must vary from time to time and place to place, and the catalogue of functions is open to revision and development (which continue throughout Eco's theoretical production). Together they offer a capacious and flexible template for sociological analysis of cultural consumption, but also for aesthetic education based on premises coincident with Frow's argument that cultural value is a contingent outcome of a politics always in process, which is primarily that of the ('intellectual') social fractions most directly concerned with it, and should be 'without embarrassment presented as their politics, not someone else's' (1995: 169). Especially as reiterated in 1983, Eco's interpretation of his 'Enlightenment' heritage in Apocalittici is (already) less troubled than Easthope's demand that 'high' and 'popular' culture be studied together by the certainty of (still) knowing the difference (Easthope 1991: 75-103).

There is, however, another reason for Eco's engagement with MacDonald: without sharing his uniform distaste for 'Midcult', he does for Kitsch, defined as the claim to exhibit 'the timeless value of Beauty' where the ambiguities of Jakobson's aesthetic function are lacking (see Eco, 1989: 180-216, especially 205 and 215-16 for points emphasised below). These ambiguities are expounded as a counter-weight to Kitsch, which is sometimes but not always a property of works: it arises in contexts of enthusiastic reception, or critical presentation, neglecting or suppressing aesthetic function; it occurs in the process of reproduction, particularly when this lends prestige to advertising or décor; and it occurs in gratuitous ornamentation of otherwise functional design. This is not simply a denunciation of the state of the fine and applied arts in market-based, technologically developed, societies, because Eco also recognises that, conversely, musical or pictorial reproductions may afford access to aesthetic function, directly or indirectly, as may works more immediately fulfilling entertainment, cathartic, or idealising functions: the cultural landscape surveyed in 1983 is less novel than Eco then pretends, while all the work on aesthetics following Apocalittici needs to be carefully reinscribed in the context of mass communication there delineated. Especially given its applicability to processes of reception, the term 'Kitsch' appears to designate a massive preponderance of the self-idealising function, and it would be puzzling that this is not explicit were it not for the volume's improvised nature.

Successive re-interpretations of the self-idealising function resonate through Apocalittici and Eco's subsequent theoretical research, conferring a third factor of unity supplementing and re-inflecting those of the general semiotic and aesthetic enquiries. For instance, the scope for self-idealisation afforded readers by the superhero's alias Clark Kent is pivotal for Eco's essay on Superman, which argues that the fantasy of transformation into a superhuman champion of Good against Evil provides a gratifying incentive for very powerless readers to seek out episode after episode; but Eco's narratology (in this respect at odds with Ricoeur's, as well as with the deconstructive force of Eco's own aesthetics) develops from here towards a diagnosis of narrativity itself as the instrument of a narcissistic drive for cognitive mastery: this trajectory culminates in Eco, 1994b: 87, 91, 115-16, 131. This other, more sustained, train of thought on self-idealisation refers, intermittently and allusively, to psychoanalytic conceptuality, suggesting also that however much the essay on Kitsch concerns the state of the arts in market-based societies, it also concerns collective and individual manifestations of a narcissism directly conflicting with any recognition of artworks as Eco conceives them, which could only ever occur intermittently, and in limited degrees. So characterised, the tension between concern for our individual and collective identities and their deconstruction by an artwork would be essential rather than contingent. Such a work could never be positioned stably within a system of cultural values: it would be an intermittently flickering anomaly, haunting the technical, economic, and political systems of the age of mass communication with its promise to inferential competences indispensable to any human organisation of meaning.

*******

There is another diagnosis of self-idealisation in Apocalittici. The apocalyptic view of mass communication can only be communicated through the media of mass communication: the antithesis of the book's title collapses on its second page into a two-word definition of the producers of a 'popular critique of popular culture' (1994a: 18), offering its readers solace comparable to that afforded by Superman. Despite its historical personifications (Adorno, Croce's many inheritors, MacDonald; the early Nietzsche), the critique's idealism is a common narcissism, struggling with an affront Eco too struggles to rationalise. In doing so, he makes strikingly original responses to the false dichotomies between a mass culture imposed by media institutions, and a popular culture arising spontaneously from below, and between this and the cultures of educated elites. These problems in turn raise others, to which he makes similarly original response, concerning the relationships between linguistic and other signs and between sign and subjectivity, the meaning of aesthetics after the disintegration or re-configuration of tradition registered in Apocalittici, the nature of narrativity, and, less directly, the difficulty of formulating these without reference to psychoanalysis.

These responses are outlined very early, independently confirming and supplementing many of the arguments collated by Easthope, and Frow, but they develop unevenly, and are transmitted even more unevenly, partly because of the vagaries of publication, translation, and re-publication for different markets (here intermittently annotated), to the point that criticism has scarcely perceived their substantial coherence (whose elucidation is the present essay's claim to orginality). In this sense, and inasmuch as they respond to the situation observed in 1964, they have also fallen victim to it, losing accessibility even as their reputation (and market value) grow: Eco remarks that the same situation, expressed through his publisher's demand for a snappy title, shaped both Apocalittici and the preface justifying it (1994a: 53-54), but something similar is true of his entire output.

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